


Magic Is the Child of Sea-Foam

by Minutia_R



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Childbirth, Gen, Gods and Spirits, Harm to Children, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Magic, Poetry, Year 0
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 04:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7669366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aino and Saku's daughter is born into a new world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic Is the Child of Sea-Foam

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to Kiraly and Rusakko for their help and encouragement!
> 
> A note about the calendar: in a conversation with Kiraly, she said she thought that Day 0 was the day Iceland closed its borders, which makes sense--but it also makes it unlikely that the rest of what would become the Known World would be using that calendar in Year 0 itself. But I wanted to talk about the idea of Year 0, and I don't think it's that implausible that a group of Finnish survivors would come up with a similar-but-not-identical concept, so that's what's going on.
> 
> The title is from [John Martin Crawford's translation of the Kalevala](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5186/pg5186.html), which is the one I've been reading because it's the first one I found for free on Project Gutenberg.

The pain comes in waves, and, like the water, it’s always there: a dull, sickening ache between crests of agony. When a contraction hits, Aino clenches her teeth, breathes hard, tenses every muscle. Tuuli tells her not to wear herself out; it’s not time to push yet, and she needs her strength for that. But it _hurts._

“Drink some more tea,” Tuuli says. “It will help you relax.”

The tea is herbal, bitter--vervain, Tuuli says, and as far as Aino can tell it doesn’t do a damned thing. She takes a sip anyway. It’s easier than arguing with Tuuli and her craziness. Especially since Tuuli and her craziness saved all their lives.

Aino can’t even call it craziness, when it’s turned out to be completely right. And she can’t blame Tuuli for the end of the world, like she made it happen by always believing it would. And she can’t hate Tuuli, when Tuuli is the only one who can get her through this.

Saku comes into the kitchen, wrapped in a robe. His perpetually-worried look has been upgraded to full-on panic. “The sauna’s ready,” he says.

“Good.” Tuuli takes Aino’s elbow and steers her down the stairs, Saku following in their wake. Halfway down, Aino’s water breaks. It doesn’t feel like anything when it happens. Aino only knows it has by the sudden rush of warm liquid down her legs, soaking the front of her robe, making the stairs slippery. She clutches the railing, and Tuuli holds her by the elbow more firmly. They manage to reach the bottom and step out of Saku’s path before he slips and falls the rest of the way.

“You don’t have to come along, you know,” says Tuuli, as Saku picks himself up, looking shaky and pale. “You’ve done your bit. And I don’t want to have to clean up after you when you vomit.”

“I’m coming,” says Saku.

“He’s coming,” says Aino. “There will be enough mess to clean up, a little vomit one way or another won’t make any difference.”

Tuuli shoots Aino a betrayed look. “Why are you taking his side? He’s the one who got you into this! Well--it’s your choice, of course.”

They all shed their robes and crowd into the sauna. It’s cramped, like all the quarters on the boat. It barely fits three comfortably under ordinary circumstances. “On the top bench. Stay out of the way,” Tuuli orders Saku, and he scrambles up.

“Here.” Tuuli speaks to Aino more gently, guides her with a hand in the small of her back. Then another contraction hits, and Aino doubles over, gasping, leaning hard on the lower bench with her elbows. “Yes, that’s right,” says Tuuli.

Aino breathes, tries to relax. The heat helps a little. The smell helps, pine and steam and heated coals. It means home. Safety. Things that don’t exist anymore. There are tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, and Saku leans forward hesitantly and takes her hands, squeezes, presses a kiss to her hair. Another contraction hits. How long was that? She’s supposed to be counting, right?

“Plant your feet wider,” says Tuuli, laying down towels. She straightens up to stand behind Aino, rubbing circles into her back. “You’re doing wonderfully.”

Aino would rather it was Kaino. But Kaino wouldn’t know what to do, and Tuuli has done this herself. Once. Eight years ago. Aino tries not to think about that.

Tries not to think longingly of hospitals, cool and sterile. Of drugs. Of a real midwife, and doctors on call in case of complications.

Those things are a dream now. This is what’s real: Tuuli behind her, and Saku in front of her, and beneath her feet, so constant that she doesn’t feel it anymore, the gentle roll of waves.

And pain.

#

For the second time, Vellamo  
Hears the cries of lovely Aino--  
Not of broken-hearted weeping,  
But full-throated cries of labor,  
And the echoes through the water  
Wake her from her restless slumber.  
Now her sleeping limbs she stretches  
Through her hair she combs her fingers  
In her sea-bed, cold Vellamo  
Wakens from her restless slumber.  
Long the days since once Vellamo  
Drove her herds out to the pasture,  
Drove them to the misty pasture  
On the surface of the waters.  
Now the world above is different:  
Strange, diseased, and unfamiliar.  
Long the days since lovely Aino  
Broken-hearted, begged for refuge  
All unwilling to be wedded  
To an ancient man, and ugly.  
Then the waters swallowed Aino:  
She became Vellamo’s maiden.  
Now the world is strange and different  
And it is a different Aino  
Crying pain across the waters.  
Seeking refuge there, unwilling  
To surrender her existence  
To an ancient, ugly power  
To a mad, rapacious bridegroom.  
For the sake of lovely Aino  
Once beloved of Vellamo,  
Goddess’ cold heart awakens  
Turns in pity towards her namesake  
Towards the child whose life now quickens  
Spilling from the thighs of Aino.  
Though the world is changed and different,  
Strange, diseased, and unfamiliar,  
Long the days since cold Vellamo  
Grazed her herds on misty lake-shores,  
With the child’s first inhalation  
Vellamo’s powers once more quicken.  
Weak the cries across the water,  
All the stronger grows Vellamo.  
Strong enough to offer refuge,  
Ancient bond of blood and water.  
To the child who now is suckling,  
Favor, always, from Vellamo.  
To her family, lost and homeless,  
Refuge, always, on the water.  
To the children still unthought-of,  
Magic in their blood forever.

#

They stopped using the old calendar as soon as the TV broadcasts stopped. October, November, the Year of Our Lord--it just didn’t seem relevant anymore.

There was a radio station that they could sometimes catch, through the strange, nightmarish static, which had started counting from the day that the first patient died of the rash illness. _Year zero_ , the young woman announcing would say, _day fifty_. There were reports of mass deaths, whole cities abandoned, people and animals transformed into misshapen, mindless, hostile things. There were also reports of survivors gathering together, creating defended areas, and Kaino suggested that they might put to shore and try to join one of those--but in the end, even she had to agree that the risk was too great. On the water, they were safe.

As far as Saku is concerned, the new world started on the day Marjatta was born. So that’s how he measures time. When Marjatta finally learns to latch on properly, so that when she wakes up hungry in the middle of the night Aino can put her to the breast and then fall back asleep, and Aino wakes up without dark circles under her eyes for the first time in weeks. When Saku is sure that Marjatta knows who he is, because she settles down in his arms when she’s fussy when she won’t for Eino or Kaino or even Tuuli.

When Marjatta can track a bright toy with her eyes when you move it around above her face, the Year Zero radio station goes silent for good.

When Marjatta first turns over from her stomach onto her back, they decide to land the boat. Tuuli and Eino had planned for the apocalypse, but there are seven of them now, and they can’t hold out forever on just the fish they catch. It’s better to try it now, and see what’s waiting for them, than to wait until they run out of food and fuel altogether.

Saku and Kaino make the first trip ashore. After so long on the lake, dry land feels unsteady under Saku’s feet, and his stomach heaves. But he can’t throw up in his breath mask, and he doesn’t dare take it off.

That’s even before they find the bodies.

They can’t afford to be squeamish now. Marjatta has started to take an interest in what the grown-ups and Veeti are eating, and Saku can see jars of baby food, the kind with smiling babies and pictures of fruit on the labels. They take as much as they can, nothing that isn’t tightly sealed, and wash everything down with bleach when they make it back to the boat. Tuuli makes them wash too, on the deck, before she’ll let them come inside.

When Marjatta starts wriggling across the floor, howling in outrage when she finds herself going backwards instead of forwards like she’d planned, they see other survivors for the first time. Saku is with Tuuli this time--they always go in twos--and when they get off the boat they see a group of people clustered on a hill above the shore. Tuuli shouts and waves, and one of the group levels a rifle at them.

In the end, they make a trade on the beach, each group retreating when the other one comes down, like in old stories of seafaring peoples who didn’t share a language. The Hotakainens leave fish, some spare tools, a bottle of hoarded Koskenkorva. They get back fresh vegetables and a few apples, butter and eggs. Saku almost cries. Marjatta gums a slice of apple and Aino tells her “apple,” with a hitch in her voice. She’s never seen one before.

When Marjatta can pull herself to standing anywhere she finds a convenient handhold, and they have to move everything breakable or dangerous out of her new reach, Eino takes Veeti out on a routine stop to a group they’ve traded with before. Only Veeti comes back, stumbling up the gangplank with a bleeding gash on his face and another down his leg.

There’s no question of going to look for Eino. Tuuli yells at Kaino to cast off, then grabs Veeti and a first aid kit and barricades them both in the rec room.

Kaino guns the engine, something they never do anymore; of all their necessary supplies, fuel is the hardest to replace. Saku scoops up Marjatta, trying to soothe her screams. Aino stations herself outside the rec room door and pleads with Tuuli to come out.

“There’s no bathroom in there! If we die, we die together, that’s what you said.” Aino sucks in a deep breath, and her voice goes low and venomous. Even with Marjatta howling, and Tuuli’s sobs barely audible through the rec room’s reinforced walls, and the memory of Veeti’s face, bloodied and wide-eyed with terror--it’s the flint in Aino’s voice that sends shivers down Saku’s spine. “You broke your other promise. Damn you, keep this one.”

Saku doesn’t know what promise she’s talking about. But Tuuli opens the door.

When Marjatta first lifts her arms to Aino and says, “Ättä,” Veeti’s fever breaks. It wasn’t the rash illness after all, only an ordinary infection, and he’s beaten it. Marjatta soon starts babbling, long strings of syllables that mean nothing Saku can understand. Veeti stops talking altogether.

When Marjatta cuts her first tooth, Saku hears the cow-call over the water. Leaning against the rail, Marjatta grumbling and restless in his arms, he hears it, high and haunting, something he hasn’t heard since childhood: the herders calling the cows home. It might be coming from a nearby island. It’s an oddly carrying sound, he remembers. But there’s no land at all as far as Saku can see through the mist.

It might be a phantom sound, the way he kept hearing his phone’s ringtone at odd moments long after there was no one left who might be calling. But Marjatta hears it too. She quiets, then gives a squeal of laughter, wriggles around and reaches over Saku’s shoulder, saying, “Muu!”

Saku turns to see what she’s looking at. There’s only mist. And for just a second, there seems to be a shape in the mist, the suggestion of a cow, blinking placidly at Marjatta as she pats its nose.

Saku is imagining it. He must be. Only--he hasn’t imagined the past year. He’s gotten out of the habit of disbelieving things just because they’re unbelievable.

And really, is it so unbelievable that there might be something special about his daughter?

#

Young Marjatta’s breath first quickened  
Rocked upon the breast of Saimaa,  
In its rippled, misty surface  
She beheld her self’s reflection,  
So with slowly shifting seasons  
Saimaa shapes Marjatta’s nature.  
In the springtime pike are spawning  
And the undersides of lilies  
Swarm with fingerlings by thousands.  
Few survive the coming winter.  
Young pike thrive in shallow water,  
Hide in shadows, hunt by ambush,  
All their teeth are backward-curving  
So their grip will never slacken.  
Pike is foremost of the fishes,  
Great in strength and secret wisdom;  
From its bones the ancient hero  
Fashioned forth the first kantele.  
In Marjatta’s bones is also  
Ancient wisdom lying hidden;  
Lurking in the shadowed shallows  
Of her breast, the pike lies patient.  
Of its hundred thousand children,  
She has lived to see the springtime.

#

The boat is sad. Marjatta can hear it. It doesn’t like sitting still any more than she does, but it never does anything else these days. It bobs on the ripples and tosses back and forth in a storm, but it never leaves the little inlet choked with rushes and water lilies. It remembers when it used to. So does Marjatta.

When she jumps up and down on the deck and says, “Go! Go! Go!” Marjatta’s father laughs. She used to laugh too and do it again. Now she’s starting to think that he’s laughing at her, and she’s not being funny, so she makes her face mad instead. That makes her father laugh harder. It really isn’t nice.

Her mother says that the boat can’t go because it doesn’t have any fuel. Whatever that means.

The water people would make the boat go, Marjatta bets. If she knew the right words to ask with. But those are the sort of words no one ever tells her. She has to find them herself.

She’s found a few. When Kaino sings, sometimes, the words have the right sound. Marjatta can feel it in her chest and in her back teeth. And she asks Kaino for more like that, but Kaino doesn’t understand. She acts like the boat is a dead thing, too, and like the water people and the mist people and the grass people aren’t even there.

Another thing Marjatta has figured out lately: most people are kind of stupid.

Right now Veeti is keeping an eye on Marjatta. Keeping an eye on Marjatta and fishing. It’s no use asking Veeti for words--he never uses many, even the regular kind. Still, he can make things and fix things and catch fish, which already makes him less stupid than a lot of people. And he doesn’t think Marjatta is strange. He doesn’t mind when she fidgets, and he doesn’t mind when she touches everything, and he doesn’t mind when she repeats the same words over and over, trying to learn their shape with her mouth.

Which is what she’s doing now. She’s found a few words that work, and this is what she can do: let loose the part inside her that isn’t little and weak, that’s kin to the water people and the grass people and even the great cold lady at the bottom of the lake.

She says the words. She gets them right and feels them catch.

Fast as a pike from the rushes--

Go!

**Author's Note:**

> ETA: cognetine has calligraphed some of the poetry from this story, and [it is AMAZING](http://bamboocounting.tumblr.com/post/166661235774/so-with-slowly-shifting-seasons-saimaa-shapes). Go look!


End file.
